Commanding spacecraft from campus: Meet the team at U of A's mission control
Members of the Pandora team assembled at the Multi-Mission Operations Center, or MMOC, to follow the live feed of Pandora launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Jan. 11.
Leslie Hawthorne Klingler, Office of Research and Partnerships
In a dimly lit, hushed room at the University of Arizona's Applied Research Building, a dozen people alternate their gaze between workstations in front of them and a wall made up of 15 flat-screen monitors, displaying rows of numbers, virtual gauges and an animated image depicting an orbit around the Earth.
A dotted line arcs across the globe, tracing the trajectory of a graphic representing Pandora, a fridge-sized spacecraft launched into orbit on Jan. 11. Its mission: observe exoplanets – worlds outside of our solar system – a science mission led by NASA and assisted by U of A Astronomy and Planetary Sciences Professor Daniel Apai.
Before Pandora can begin science observations from its orbit around Earth, a team of software engineers, systems engineers and project managers has assembled at the Multi-Mission Operations Center, or MMOC, to complete a laundry list of tests and verification during a phase known as commissioning of the spacecraft. Occasionally, someone voices a status update. All parameters indicate the spacecraft is healthy. Inching across the globe on the screen, the spacecraft flies over Antarctica.
Nic Altamirano is the mission operations manager at the Multi-Mission Operations Center, part of the U of A's Arizona Space Institute.
Kris Hanning, Office of Research and Partnerships
A mission control milestone
Jan. 15 marked a special day for the MMOC team, as it commenced the activities necessary for taking over responsibility for spacecraft commanding, including health and safety monitoring, ground station scheduling, as well as coordination with NASA and mission partners.
"We are currently in the middle of what we call 'handoff,'" said Nic Altamirano, mission operations manager, referring to the transfer of mission operations from Blue Canyon Technologies, the company that built the spacecraft platform, to the U of A team.
Pandora completes an orbit approximately every 90 minutes, following a near-polar trajectory that passes close to both poles. On each pass over the Arctic or Antarctic regions, the satellite establishes a communication link with one of the two ground stations located in those areas.
The Pandora spacecraft sits on a cart in the clean room at Blue Canyon Technologies, where it was built. The telescope is at the top, and the solar panel is in its folded configuration.
Blue Canyon Technologies
"Every 45 minutes, we can talk to the spacecraft and get an update about its status," Altamirano explained. "Once we verify that the systems and the payload are working as intended, and we're going into more nominal operations, we'll contact it up to four times a day," he said.
During this phase, Altamirano and the MMOC team work with their mission partners to perform a range of testing and verifications to ensure all the systems and instruments on the spacecraft are operational. Once Pandora begins its mission of staring at 21 exoplanets over 12 months, Altamirano's team will take instructions from the science operations team to guide and schedule the observations.
"We will turn the observation requirements into a sequence of commands that we can then send to the spacecraft," he said. "We're responsible for the safety and risk associated with the spacecraft, commanding, and real-time telemetry monitoring, so we watch the telemetry, the data coming down from the spacecraft, and look out for any anomalies that may take place."
A dedicated lab in the ARB holds the Pandora Engineering Development Unit, or EDU – a fully functional assembly of Pandora.
"Each time we need to run a sequence of commands, we run it on the EDU first before sending it to the actual spacecraft," Altamirano says.
'Super rewarding' science
Consisting of software engineers, systems engineers and documentarians, the team of 10 is likely to expand as more missions are being added to the MMOC's portfolio, Altamirano said.
Getting the MMOC up and running required integrating and configuring command and control software from the ground up. The goal of the mission operations center is to serve as a center for multiple missions operating at the same time and to offer the service to not only U of A researchers, but industry partners in Arizona and around the world.
Altamirano considers working at the MMOC "super rewarding" and credits the MMOC team members, all of whom gained experience working on other U of A space missions such as OSIRIS-REx, OSIRIS-APEX and Mars Odyssey.
"They have dedicated the last four years to get the MMOC in a position where we can do actual mission operations from here," he says. "It's one of those things where you never in a million years imagine that you have the opportunity to be a part of something that has an impact, not only on the university, but personally and in the broader spectrum for science."